Carbon farmers remove CO2 from air and get money from 'greenwashers'

With more and more companies committed to net-zero emission goals, schemes offering carbon credit offsetting are increasingly popular. One such programme in Austria has businesses pay farmers to treat their land to store more CO2 from the atmosphere. 

CGTN visited a so-called carbon farm outside Vienna. Salts, mushrooms and stone sediments. "We are brewing a compost tea which massively strengthens the plants," says Herbert Zetner, who uses specific fertilizer ingredients hoping to enable his crops to help fight global warming. 

Strong plants means an enriched harvest. By constantly covering his fields with nutrient-rich greenery, the Austrian farmer also increases the amount of CO2 storage. "The plants pump the CO2 into the top 5-10 centimeters of soil," Zener adds.

The richer the soil, the more CO2 plants can remove from the atmosphere and store in the ground. Carbon farmers like Herbert Zetner are aiming for a CO2 soil share of 5 percent which - he says - can bind 225 tons of CO2 per hectare, almost double the amount of carbon dioxide stored by regular farm soils.

After five years of this 'carbon farming', independent inspectors verify the amount of the greenhouse gas in the soil and issue CO2 certificates which the farmer can then sell to companies as part of their net zero targets.

'Carbon farming is greenwashing'

Not everyone supports such schemes. Several environmental organizations say such business practice is greenwashing, with better ways to store carbon available.

"We don't necessarily need companies kind of buying CO2 certificates and greenwashing themselves as climate neutral when they are not," Martin Wildenberg from Global 2000 told CGTN. 

"The most effective way to store carbon in ecosystems is re-watering peat swamps. They are the ecosystems which store the most CO2 compared to the area they cover." 

Zetner's carbon farming, which he does alongside regular farming adds around one third to his workload, but payment from CO2 certificates doesn't fully compensate him for his time. "Helping increase the CO2 storage means about a third more work every day," he says. "If carbon farmers were compensated a bit more, it would be better, because then more farmers would jump on the environmental bandwagon."

Zetner says his initially sceptical colleagues are now showing more interest in his work.

Currently only around 1 percent of Austrian farmers are participating in carbon farming. Increasing that number would see more of the country's greenhouse gas go into the ground.

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